Just Abortion theory

[Anonymous]

For medical procedures, physician organizations should regulate. We don’t need ignorant politicians making laws. Bonus is that doctors are sworn to “protect life”.

Why don’t you trust doctors? They are good at understanding health issues and to weigh the risks.

Why do you want to force your religious beliefs on everyone else? Would you be ok if another religion forced their beliefs on you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Back to OP's original post, no, just abortion theory does not work because fetuses are wholly innocent, regardless of how they came to exist in the first place. They may have been the product of violent rape or may be causing severe distress (mental or physical) to the mother, but none of those things are actually the fault of the fetus. So whatever violence you choose to inflect on the fetus is not in response to any action of the fetus, but in response to the mother's own experiences/circumstances. To go down this just abortion theory, you are essentially arguing that it may be sometimes permissible to harm innocent life for another good (maybe even greater good), aka utilitarianism. No serious Christian will go down that route with you.

I have no idea how Just War Theory works, but can pretty much guarantee somewhere in there they allow for the killing of "innocent" people.

Say what you really mean, PP: The fetus is innocent and the pregnant woman is guilty because she opened her legs. Her life is therefore worth less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The entire framework is already there.

For a government, the ability to put one individual's rights over another's requires both to have legal rights, which is why the idea of when human life beings is vital to this issue (and that fact that human cells are alive doesn't make it a living human being -- many combinations of human cells doe not develop into a person). It is what makes this issue different for all other religious-based legal controversies. Roe tried to avoid the religious ensoulment issue and use the best available scientific evidence to answer this, and decided that when the fetus could live on its own outside the womb it attains rights that the government can protect. Many disagree with this as either to restrictive or not restrictive enough. Beyond that, the government cannot know any more than theologians, who concede that they don't know, but they have religious based beliefs about the issue.

"Anti-abortion at any point" is based in theology on the concession that one cannot know when the soul enters the body and life begins, and that some religions decide that the morally safer -- not morally correct, but morally safer - choice is to assume (not know) that is happens at conception. That is the Catholic teaching. This can inform one's personal choice. Theologians also acknowledge that different religions believe the soul enters the body at different times (e.g. upon the first breath of life), and so their moral choice is different. Others do not believe in a soul at all, so there is no moral aspect to the decision. None of these positions can be proved objectively right or wrong, and all studied theologies acknowledge that we do not know, but we can form beliefs.

And to the "cells are alive so ensoulment doesn't matter" poster, yes, it does matter legally whether the cells are a separate human being from the host mother, otherwise any removal of human cells would be murder, as all cells are alive, but not all cells are human beings with separate legal rights. The concession about unknowable ensoulment is why this pivot is seen as necessary to the pro-life movement - they they can't prove ensoulment so they must argue it doesn't matter -- even though the whole premise of the theology of abortion is based on ensoulment.

As an American, one must accept that when different religions have different beliefs on a point, the government cannot adopt one religion's belief system over all others, nor can it force an individual to personally act against her religion (except when two peoples' rights come into conflict -- hence the soul question). So they can't force abortions on people, but they also cannot choose which religion has the correct moral view on when life begins and adopt a particular religion's moral belief and ban all abortions, thus denying the rights of others to hold and act on contrary religious and moral beliefs.

As for when it is justified after the point of viability, we already have jurisprudence that balances the rights of individuals against each other: self-defense, good-samaritan, suicide, etc. The most basic one is that a government cannot force a person to be a hero, specifically, to take an action that would result in personal harm even if by taking that heroic risk the person would save another (aka Bystander Laws or Good Samaritan Laws). Why would this not apply to the personal harm of pregnancy and childbirth? Similarly but opposite, our laws acknowledge that a killing is justified to save oneself from death or serious bodily harm (not that some states are saying just death when it domes to pregnancy and this is creating seriously tragic results); or when in an unenviable position of having to choose between two lives, you have not committed murder in making that terrible choice. Consider this: if suicide is unlawful, why can a mother decide to give birth knowing it will cause her own death? Why should the reverse decision be unlawful then?

Anyway, there is more, but I propose that the framework for you request, OP, already exists.

Your argument rests on a flaw: that we should consider "soul" when discussion whether life is worth protecting. Scientifically, human life absolutely begins at conception. I don't see how anyone can argue against this with a straight face. Go look at any biology book, or go look at all those sources another poster listed. For a multicultural/multi-religious society like ours where some people don't believe in souls and others do, we shouldn't consider souls at all. Let's just stay at the biological level. Human life beings at conception. Now, I think a natural conclusion from that is all human life deserve protection. The burden is on you, the folks who want to give license to freely kill off a portion of human population, to justify yourself. Whatever appeal you make to poverty, burden to parents, stress, medical conditions, etc, just remember that those characteristics may just as easily apply to you one day.

What you have stated is your opinion and belief. Repeating it over and over doesn't change that. Nor does it convince people. Period.

[Anonymous]

I know a guy who is only here because his mother wanted to make up for the miscarriage she had.

Every birth is an accident.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know a guy who is only here because his mother wanted to make up for the miscarriage she had.

Every birth is an accident.

K

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to OP's original post, no, just abortion theory does not work because fetuses are wholly innocent, regardless of how they came to exist in the first place. They may have been the product of violent rape or may be causing severe distress (mental or physical) to the mother, but none of those things are actually the fault of the fetus. So whatever violence you choose to inflect on the fetus is not in response to any action of the fetus, but in response to the mother's own experiences/circumstances. To go down this just abortion theory, you are essentially arguing that it may be sometimes permissible to harm innocent life for another good (maybe even greater good), aka utilitarianism. No serious Christian will go down that route with you.

How do people so obsessed with the concept of life eat meat? I don’t get that disconnect.

Because the overwhelming, vast majority of people who claim to care about the lives of fetuses are lying through their teeth. They know it, we know it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Back to OP's original post, no, just abortion theory does not work because fetuses are wholly innocent, regardless of how they came to exist in the first place. They may have been the product of violent rape or may be causing severe distress (mental or physical) to the mother, but none of those things are actually the fault of the fetus. So whatever violence you choose to inflect on the fetus is not in response to any action of the fetus, but in response to the mother's own experiences/circumstances. To go down this just abortion theory, you are essentially arguing that it may be sometimes permissible to harm innocent life for another good (maybe even greater good), aka utilitarianism. No serious Christian will go down that route with you.

There are a ton of people who consider themselves “serious Christians” who believe that rape and incest are acceptable exceptions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to OP's original post, no, just abortion theory does not work because fetuses are wholly innocent, regardless of how they came to exist in the first place. They may have been the product of violent rape or may be causing severe distress (mental or physical) to the mother, but none of those things are actually the fault of the fetus. So whatever violence you choose to inflect on the fetus is not in response to any action of the fetus, but in response to the mother's own experiences/circumstances. To go down this just abortion theory, you are essentially arguing that it may be sometimes permissible to harm innocent life for another good (maybe even greater good), aka utilitarianism. No serious Christian will go down that route with you.

There are a ton of people who consider themselves “serious Christians” who believe that rape and incest are acceptable exceptions.

And how does that work? Do you know long it takes to prosecute rape? How difficult it is to prove? Do you expect SAHMs to report their husbands for marital rape?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to OP's original post, no, just abortion theory does not work because fetuses are wholly innocent, regardless of how they came to exist in the first place. They may have been the product of violent rape or may be causing severe distress (mental or physical) to the mother, but none of those things are actually the fault of the fetus. So whatever violence you choose to inflect on the fetus is not in response to any action of the fetus, but in response to the mother's own experiences/circumstances. To go down this just abortion theory, you are essentially arguing that it may be sometimes permissible to harm innocent life for another good (maybe even greater good), aka utilitarianism. No serious Christian will go down that route with you.

There are a ton of people who consider themselves “serious Christians” who believe that rape and incest are acceptable exceptions.

And how does that work? Do you know long it takes to prosecute rape? How difficult it is to prove? Do you expect SAHMs to report their husbands for marital rape?

Oh I agree that it’s an unworkable fig leaf in practice, but those terrible situations make the pregnant woman “innocent” so abortion is justified in those cases.

[Anonymous]

To me, the most common profile of a woman getting an abortion is a 17-23 year old student. Innocent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To me, the most common profile of a woman getting an abortion is a 17-23 year old student. Innocent.

In reality the majority of women who seek abortions are older than that and already have children.

[Anonymous]

The real purpose is to keep women down and out of the workforce. The good jobs that is. After 3 children childcare becomes a real obstacle for working women in lower paying jobs. Thus the very men who oppose abortion take those jobs. I think that’s the overall reason. Those old guys don’t really care about children unborn or otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The real purpose is to keep women down and out of the workforce. The good jobs that is. After 3 children childcare becomes a real obstacle for working women in lower paying jobs. Thus the very men who oppose abortion take those jobs. I think that’s the overall reason. Those old guys don’t really care about children unborn or otherwise.

This one of the purposes. The others are to increase the “domestic supply of infants” available to be adopted like in the good ole days, to have more soldiers and more desperately poor women & children to perform the jobs nobody else wants.

[Anonymous]

Tertullian observed from the Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice that ‘…there is no difference as to baby killing whether you do it as a sacred rite or just because you choose to do it.’

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Scientifically speaking, humans go through many stages of development: fetal, newborn, toddlerhood, childhood, young adult, adult, senior. How can anyone dispute this? If you want to kill off people in a certain phase of development, you better have a much better argument than "mental health of the mother." The only possible rationale for abortion is that the fetus is residing within the mother while the human in other stages are outside of the mother. So that's why I posed the removal of fetus thought experiment. And all I heard was BS avoidance tactics. "You don't have a right to take my embryo!" Says who? You had a right to not create another human being, but you did and now that human should have some rights. While his rights might not trump the mothers, you don't have an absolute right to kill another human just for the sake of control (vs letting me or govt take it).

And it doesn't matter that third trimester terminations are rare. You all are arguing against any type of checks, only "my body my choice." So you better be ok with women terminating for unwanted gender (see China and East Asia), and down the road, height, eye color, skin pigment. Are you ok with that? If not, on what grounds would you object?

Anther woman's choices are NONE of my business. No, I have no objections. You've got some nerve.